Archive for July 2010
What the Heck is a Laestrygonian Anyways?
“Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured out from Harrison’s. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr. Bloom’s gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar, or they’d taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it?” (U 129.232-38)
No doubt this small excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses will be the most interesting bit of writing you will ever see in this blog dedicated to my culinary adventures in a city, well, that I think should be a little more well known for its eateries. In my three years here in London, Ontario, I have found that some of the most notable experiences I’ve had in this city have focused around food. Some might say that this is because the only thing to do in LondonONT is eat. . . Some might be right.
In his wanderings around noontime Dublin, Leopold Bloom searches his own city for a place to fill his stomach, passing the strange site of an outsider much like himself taking in the unparalleled aroma of bread, freshly baked. And yet, Bloom’s always quizzical mind asks the question to which I intend to find my own answer. Is food, the smell of it, the taste of it, the feel of it, the sight of it, the sound of it a source of pleasure or pain?
Doubtless I have come up with a few opinions about food in my, now, twenty-seven and five sixths years of eating, but the most stable opinion about food, the one that always keeps me returning to a favourite restaurant or (more often) a favourite recipe is this: food and its preparation is an art, and it is the greatest and most fleeting kind of art we have.
There is no more satisfying creative process in the world than the preparation of a meal for oneself and another. A plate of food lovingly tasked over, spoiled as if it were a child with hours of preparation, its component parts carefully selected, meticulously prepared, and eventually shared with another is more than a Cezanne painting, a Coens film, an Amis novel: more than these artists and their art forms, food can reach into all your senses. And I do mean all. Food overloads your Aristotelian senses; a good meal–an important meal–is heard by ears that strain toward the kitchen, seen by eyes that revel when an oppressive lid is pulled away, smelled by a dip of a head low, felt by discerning fingers, tasted by an equally discerning tongue. Food exercises our audition and our vision, our olafaction and our tactition, and, yes, our gustation. I’ve never listened to a Cezanne, smelled a Coens film, or tasted an Amis novel; well, at least I don’t make it a habit of eating paper. There’s just too much other good stuff to sink my teeth into.
To understand how my suggestion that food is art connects to Bloom’s conundrum of the pleasures and the pains of food, I offer another personal precept about art: art should be something you love and something you hate almost simultaneously. The artists whom I respect most are those that simultaneously make me love them and loathe them; I love them for their contribution. I loathe them for their genius. Of course, the hatred half of this bilateral is driven purely by jealousy, and, you know, I’m absolutely fine with that. That means that as a creator, I know how far away I am from where I need to be, and for me, the most rewarding way to try and produce a sort of artistic affect is food. Sure, I play guitar, and I sing, and I act, and I sketch, and I write, and I spread myself too thin to be too good at any one thing (on purpose I’m convinced) because I can never see myself so good at any one thing as to be the envy of a person who simultaneously can’t stop listening to me, watching me, surveying me, or reading me, while hating me all the while.
But I can make a mean salsa, I get rave reviews about my lamb burgers, and my warm German potato salad, if I may be permitted, ain’t bad either. My guacamole, however, was proven inferior by a friend just last night who so perfectly married a comfortably ripe mango with the softness of avocados to create something that, yes, I could shake my head at, while still stuffing my face with more. If there is any one creative medium, any one artistic venue that carries the potential to change a person’s mood, to affect them with reinvented emotions and reactions, that I want to share in with the people I love, the people I respect, the people I could not do without, it will forever be food.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus travels to Telepylus. His fleet enters a bottleneck, while his ship stays behind. He sends two men onto the island to search for inhabitants and they meet the daughter of Antiphates, king of a race of giants, known as Laestrygonians, who cannibalize men’s flesh. Odysseus escapes while his two scouts are left at the mercy of the giants whose only debate is whether to eat the men when they are first caught or to save them for later.
A Laestrygonian, most importantly to me, is a person who will eat anything. I hope to one day be one of these fearless giants. Now, I know the risks. One unruly scarf too many and I become one of those obscene Lestrygogs from Bloom’s Dublin, a patron of one of the various eateries in my city from which a hero might need to turn away from in disgust. I hope that I will prove here in this shared space that I am not a gluttonous Dubliner who inhales, unthinkingly, bits of cannibalized meat, but instead that I am a surveyor of food, all sorts of food, the food he makes, and the food that is made for him.
How will I undertake this task? Hmm… I think I’ll start by ordering the ”[p]enny dinner. Knife and fork chained to the table” (U 129.238-39). Careful now.
References: Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et. al. New York: Vintage, 1986.
